Minorities in the US continue to suffer “inequalities, discrimination and hate speech.”
The UN Rapporteur for minorities, Fernand de Varennes, said this Monday, at the end of a fifteen-day visit to the United States, that minorities in this country continue to suffer “inequalities, discrimination and hate speech”, in the preliminary report that he shared with the press today.
Although the administration of President Joe Biden has brought some progress in this regard – and cited an executive order to curb anti-Asian hate speech – De Varennes stressed that the US legislation passed after the laws that ended anti-black discrimination “shows signs of fatigue. “and it is incomplete when it comes to protecting the basic rights of minorities.
“Racism, hatred and xenophobia are growing in a worrying way,” he insisted, and “minorities feel increasingly excluded”, because the health crisis produced by the coronavirus pandemic or the economic crisis that followed have the result that “they exacerbate inequalities “and already marginalized minorities suffer the most.
The judicial and prison system, with an overrepresentation of African American and Latino citizens that does not correspond to their demographic weight, gives the impression that it “forgives the richest and punishes the poorest,” he reasoned.
De Varennes elaborated on the political consequences of this discrimination, and gave as an example the case of Texas, where there are “language barriers” that prevent the Hispanic electorate that does not speak English from exercising their right to vote, either due to lack of posters and messages in their language or for lack of help in advising them within the electoral college to exercise their vote.
It is not the only barrier in Texas, and he cited others such as the sometimes great distance between polling stations and the lack of transportation for citizens on election day, or other more subtle ones such as the design of electoral districts that continues to give weight to what which he called “the white Anglo-Saxon majority” despite the fact that other communities, and especially Hispanics, are the ones that are growing the most demographically, without this being reflected in the electoral system.
In the antipodes is the case of California, where the state has launched initiatives to ensure that the different communities – not only Hispanic, as it also cited the Korean – have enough information and means to vote and in general to access the public services, as has been the case during the pandemic.
One of the stages of his trip was Puerto Rico, where he cited two examples of discrimination: one political, such as the fact that its inhabitants do not vote in the presidential elections – something that in his opinion makes them “non-citizen Americans” – and another environmental one: according to him, it is evident that minorities (he did not mention which one he was referring to) are those that live in the most polluted areas of the island.
The Rapporteur met today with members of the State Department, who were the ones who invited him to the mission, and they acknowledged that “the United States is not perfect and there is room for improvement,” to which he was pleased because a stage opens with them. dialogue.
The final report will be delivered to the US Government in March 2022. (I)
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